If you've never seen an aloe in bloom, look closely--here it is. My aloe spent the winter in a makeshift greenhouse where it gets plenty of light but not much attention (which means that it rarely gets watered). When I went to fetch it, to tell it that spring had arrived and it was time to wake up and get growing, I found that it had anticipated me. It was already in bloom, for the very first time in its life. This is a six- or seven-year-old plant, growing happily in a large terra cotta frog. Ribbit.
And here's something else that's just starting to bloom: a new writing project. Well, sort of. I haven't actually started it just yet. I've only just begun to start it, if you get my meaning. And since I don't usually go through all this rigamarole when I'm beginning a new project, I thought I'd tell you about it, so you'll be in on it from the word go. Or almost.
Last summer, when Linda Lear and I were discussing her in-progress biography of Beatrix Potter, I suggested that she might want to write a junior biography. The ones I had seen were pretty woeful, incomplete and uninformed by any recent research. And she had a gazillion tons of research material, and interviews, and all that good stuff about Beatrix that could easily translate into a biography for young readers. Linda thought about this for, oh, about 30 seconds, and declined. (I think she felt, understandably, that eight years invested in Beatrix was enough.)
So I told her I'd give some thought to the idea of doing it myself. I did, and kept on thinking, while I finished the Cottage Tale I was working on, and then Nightshade, which was next on the to-do list. And then I got a very good start on the memoir (half-baked now and ripening on the shelf), and went back to thinking about the junior biography. And thinking. And finally I got to the point (when I got back from New Mexico) of writing a three-page proposal for a book called Beatrix Potter: A Magical Life.
But Bill and I haven't had an agent for seven or eight years, and in order to sell this new project, I'd need a new agent, which is much easier said than done. Agents--particularly children's nonfiction agents--don't grow on trees. And you need a specialty agent for something like this: somebody who knows the current market, who has looked at lots of projects like A Magical Life and can judge its marketability, and who understand it and feels enthusiastic. This week, with a referral from Linda Lear to her agent, and a referral from Linda's agent to one of the larger agencies in New York, I've found an agent, a very good one, who's as excited about the project as I am.
I have to tell you that this has happened at a very good time. I'll be gone all next month and won't have a moment to sit around and chew my fingernails and wonder what's happening in New York--I'll be on the road with Spanish Dagger. And maybe, with luck, some discerning editor who is hungry for just this project will snap it right up, so that when I get back, I'll have the delicious pleasure of telling you that the proposal is about to bloom into a book. Ribbit.
Or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be like that aloe, and sit around for six or seven years before it decides to bloom. You never know in this business. That's part of the excitement. I guess. But I think I'll pass on excitement tonight, and pour myself a glass of celebratory wine and sit down with the rest of the galleys of Hawthorn House (I've got 100 pages to go). And my spinning. Feels right.
Reading note. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. --Jorge Luis Borges